with undue timidity or irrational shyness and
reserve.

They are not very weak or very timid, then.
Granted.  But they do not pretend to be so.
Rarely, if ever, was there a period when that
kind of hypocrisy and affectation flourished less
than now.  The education of young people in
the present day does not tend to produce those
vices.  In days of greater severity, and when
repression was more generally practised, the
young were taught to conceal their natural
feelings and instincts.  It was not genteel then to
have a good appetite and strong nerves, and
ladies who possessed those qualities were at some
pains to keep them out of sight.  And so it was
with other things.  The prim maidens of the genteel
period would often, doubtless, have been glad
to have acted with the unrestrained freedom
which characterises the young ladies of our own
day, had they not been put through a course of
repressive education.  Depend upon it, my
excellent parent, that there were many young
persons ot what you are pleased to call  "your
time," who would have been very glad to gallop
in Rotten Row, or to sit behind a pair of fiery
bays in Piccadilly, or even, perhaps, to bully a
respectable gentleman out of his money at a
fancy fair, if they had only had the chance.
This is what it is imperatively necessary that I
should explain to you.  Young ladies used to be
what governesses and backboards made them.
Nature is now allowed to have a voice in the
matter, and she makes herself heard, I promise
you.  She makes herself heard, and when one
of these her children has tastes that are rather
of a fast order, she (Nature and her child too)
acquaints you with that fact at once and
unmistakably. The truth is before you, and you don't
like it.  In your day you were used to have it
veiled and smoothed over and kept down, just
as people are used to having the defects of
their external appearance smoothed over when
their portraits are painted, and become dissatisfied
with photographic revelations.

This revealing of what people naturally are,
which is one of the distinctive features of modern
times, has led to more striking revelations among
women than among men, for the simple reason
that the "weaker" was formerly much the more
carefully disguised of the two sexes. Those great
schools where, in former times, young ladies
were "finished," such as that which once stood
in awful seclusion on Campden-hill at Kensington,
and traditions concerning which have come
down to the present generation, were wonderful
places for smothering natural and human
propensities.  The pupils at such seminaries
were so completely drilled to pattern, that they
were made all alike, much as their handwriting
was.

Now-a-days, if the character of a young lady
be not what is called feminine, she does not
pretend to be so.  All women are not feminine.
Many are courageous, strong, decided, and the
reverse of shy.  Many are active, fond of fun,
and of violent exercises, inclined to talk slang,
and apt to assume something of a masculine
tone in costume and manner.  These, by their
volatile nature, rise to the surface, and are
taken as specimens of the young lady of the
period.

To sum up, my dear sir.  This is what it has
been my object to put before you: that the
difference between the modern and the old system
of bringing up young ladies, and the withdrawal
of much of the repressive element from their
education, account in a great degree for the
existence of those phenomena which have been
erroneously regarded by some persons (your
respected self among them) as indicating a change
in the race.  I hope this explanation may have
cleared the subject for you, and may incline you
to take a more lenient view of the conduct of
those young persons, and of their manners and
customs, than has hitherto been your wont.
                           P. CHESTERFIELD, JUNIOR.

  AN IMMENSE GIPSY PARTY.

MANY people live with a belief in hidden
dangers and secret agencies to the rest of the
world simply unreasonable and chimerical.
With some it is the Jesuits, and how, cunningly
masked under the guise of the footman or the
baker's-boy, the lady's maid or the lawyer, they
penetrate into every home, seducing from the
purer faith, and making of the young secret
converts for Rome, by means undreamt of by friends
or relations.  With others it is the "Reds,"
and how they are undermining the solid temple
of the laws in every factory and workshop
throughout the kingdom, preparing the way for
a universal social deluge, when rapine and ruin
shall take the place of work and prosperity,
and the country shall be thrown into the hands
of a few needy scoundrels occupied mainly
in brandishing their pikes and cutting off their
neighbours' heads.  And with others it is the
police spy system, and how the most ordinary
doings of each man's daily life are duly known
and reported down at Scotland-yard, with a wild
belief in the omnipotence and omnipresence of
the masked and hidden detective.  These are
the most general of the secret bogies troubling
men's dreams, though by no means all the
bogies; the underhand workings of Russian
diplomacy, with one class of politicians—how
the German element is swamping Europe, with
another—the sudden invasion by France of
England, with a third—and now Fenianism,
with many, prominent among the more public
ones.

Another craze, hitherto not general, but
which, if believed in, will throw over society a
delightful if slightly maddening amount of
mystery, has been put forth in a certain book,*
written by a Scottish enthusiast, by which it
appears that both Scotland and England are
penetrated through and through with gipsy
blood, and that men and women whom we had
all along taken for douce and honest Anglo-
*  A History of the Gipsies.  By Walter Simson.